Community All Starz: Soccer is Here!

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For a long time, our community members have asked us to bring soccer to their school sites! We are proud to announce that as part of our Community All Starz Initiative-- we have listened to their request and made it happen! Soccer is now part of our community of students at New Highland Academy and growing to other sites!

Enjoy some of our pictures below...

Let's get this game started!

Our team is ready for the game ahead!

But not before taking a pledge to do their best as a team!

Teamwork in Action!

"Pasamela!" (Pass it here!)

Getting ready to make their next move!

Players in Action!

Team mates ready for anything!

The game is getting intense!

Parents and Families/Friends Show Up!

Parents come and enjoy their children play!

Students come and show their parents what they're made of!

Team Huttle!

Coach Edwin strategizes with his team.

Here we go!

Let's do this!

The game is almost over!

Who will it be!?

Celebrating a Win with some Pizza!

The winners!

"cheese!" pizza that is!

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Why is Soccer so good for kids? Soccer is practically a physical literacy wonder drug. If we could package it in tablet form, we could sell it as a prescription medicine for developing all-around movement skills in children.﻿

Just about any sport or physical activity will help to develop physical literacy and good movement skills. However, if you had to pick one sport that developed the most skills and capacities, it would have to be soccer.

Even at the basic levels of development, physical literacy includes a long list of fundamental movement skills. The most essential of these — out of hundreds — are generally accepted to be running, jumping, throwing, catching, kicking, hopping, skipping, galloping, and dodging. These skills are based in turn on a foundation of physical capacities called the ABCs of movement: agility, balance, coordination, and speed.

Throw into the mix some spatial orientation skills and cognitive decision making, and you have most of what makes up physical literacy.

So how does soccer rate on these points? Extraordinarily well, as it turns out.

1. ABCs

Agility, balance, coordination, and speed are closely connected to the development of the central nervous system (CNS) in early childhood. The bodies of preschool children are silently waiting for precisely the kind of stimulation that will get the CNS preparing and adapting for the ABCs. As it happens, quick changes of direction and diversity of movement are intrinsic to soccer, so the simple act of playing the game provides the perfect stimuli to help children to develop these capacities. You can almost hear each child’s CNS saying: “Gee, thanks for registering me in soccer!”

2. Running

Soccer involves a little bit of running. Actually, it involves a lot of running. And best of all, for children who haven’t reached puberty, it provides exactly the kind of running they need: short distance sprinting followed by short time intervals of recovery. Note: If your child’s U9 coach is sending the team on long laps of the field, you might ask him why. The science shows that jogging around a soccer field at half speed is doing nothing to develop the quickness and interval recovery required to play soccer. Furthermore, it isn’t helping your pre-pubertal child to be a better distance runner any more than if she was playing the game for 10 minutes and having a lot more fun.

3. Jumping, hopping, skipping, galloping, and dodging

When your child plays soccer, there are a lot of other players on the field who want to frustrate their efforts to run and play the ball. Consequently, the game demands that kids do a lot of jumping and dodging to evade opponents. It also demands that they hop, skip, and even gallop at times as they change speed and adjust their stride to avoid players and change direction.

4. Throwing and catching

Hold on. When are you allowed to use your hands in soccer? Well, for starters, every time the ball passes out of play on the sidelines. Play restarts with a throw in, and every player needs to learn how to do it. And goalkeepers, a position just about every child plays at some point during their early years in the game, are constantly catching the ball with their hands and passing it to teammates with a baseball-style throw.

5. Tracking the movement of an object in flight

One of the less discussed aspects of physical literacy — but integral to throwing and catching as well as striking something with a bat or racquet — is the ability to track the movement of an object (e.g., ball) as it travels through the air. Your child’s ability to use her eyes to track movement and estimate speed and distance does not “just happen”. As with movement skills, it needs to be developed through real experience and practice. Soccer provides plenty of experience as the game constantly challenges players to gauge the speed, distance, and trajectory of the ball.

6. Decision making

The ability to “read the environment” and respond with appropriate decisions is another element of physical literacy that is often overlooked. In the days of our distant ancestors, it might have meant deciding to climb a tree quickly after spotting a lion. In the context of a sport such as soccer, it is deciding to pass the ball to a teammate running to open space, or shooting at goal when the goalkeeper is out of position. The game constantly creates fresh cognitive challenges where players must gather information from their physical environment, analyze that information, and then execute an appropriate physical response.

Not only is this the name of our sports curriculum but also of our entire sports program. The core values of the Community All-Starz are focused around teaching our student athletes to be responsible members of their community by giving back in a variety of service learning projects focused around developing in them a wider perspective of what it means to be an “All-Star” Athlete. ALL our students involved in any of our competitive sports MUST participate in a service learning project. Projects in the past include; Food and coat drives, community clean ups, visiting senior citizens, as well as helping out in homeless shelters, among other projects!﻿